A two-headed monster

Israel should negotiate with Mahmoud Abbas, despite his flawed deal with Hamas

FOR several decades after 1967 Israel's main parties adopted incompatible positions on the greatest dilemma facing the Jewish state: what to do with the lands captured in the six-day war. Labour said the West Bank could be traded for peace; Likud that it was the Jews' biblical homeland, given in sacred trust by God and never to be surrendered. That did not stop the two parties from sometimes sharing power. A disgruntled member of one national-unity government in 1984 called it “a two-headed monster”. But when push comes to shove, beleaguered Israelis often sink their differences and stand together.

It helps to bear this in mind as the world decides in the coming weeks how to react to the power-sharing agreement the main Palestinian factions have just signed in Mecca (see article). Fatah and Hamas hold incompatible views about the biggest dilemma facing the Palestinians. Fatah reluctantly accepts the need to partition historic Palestine between a Jewish state and an Arab one; Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, his successor as president of the Palestinian Authority, signed solemn agreements with Israel saying so. Hamas, in contrast, refuses to acknowledge Israel's right to exist and claims all of Palestine as a sacred trust for Islam. Even so, and despite last-minute quarrels, Hamas and Fatah appear now to be trying to stand together against their Israeli foe.

This is not the result America, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations—the international Quartet trying to coax the Palestinians and Israelis to peace—wanted. They are grateful to Saudi Arabia for brokering a deal that should prevent the recent fighting between Fatah and Hamas from billowing into a civil war. But the agreement does not meet the explicit conditions the Quartet set as its price for ending the embargo it imposed after Hamas won last year's legislative elections. The Quartet wants Hamas to recognise Israel, renounce violence and honour existing Palestinian agreements with Israel. The only concession Mr Abbas appears to have extracted from Hamas in Mecca is a vague promise to “respect” international resolutions and agreements signed by the Palestine Liberation Organisation. On the first two conditions, to judge by the details published so far, Hamas seems to have given little new ground in Mecca.

This means that Condoleezza Rice, America's secretary of state, is going to have a sticky time at next week's summit in Jerusalem with Mr Abbas and Ehud Olmert, Israel's prime minister. She has lately come to see the merit of fleshing out George Bush's skeletal “vision” of a two-state solution. The Jerusalem meeting was supposed to begin a process in which the tough final issues such as borders and refugees might be discussed, as well as the immediate security concerns that are always uppermost in Israel's mind. That will be much harder now. Mr Olmert will ask how he can be expected to do any business at all with a Palestinian government whose dominant party denies Israel's right to exist, remains wedded to armed struggle and says it wants Israel's destruction.

It is a good question. But here is a better one. What is the alternative? Refusing to talk to the Palestinians' two-headed monster will not make Hamas go away. It has shown over the past year that it is too widely supported to be browbeaten into concessions either by sanctions or by pressure from Fatah. And Mecca suggests that Mr Abbas has little desire at present to take Hamas on either with guns or at the polling booth.

Make it look real, and maybe they will buy it

In the 1980s Israelis did not let their divisions over the occupied lands tear their nation apart. Why should they, so long as the Palestinians gave no hint of ever accepting Israel? It all began to change when by accepting the Jewish state's permanence Arafat made the dream of peace look real to Israelis.

The trick now is to make statehood look real enough to Palestinians for the majority to abandon Hamas's bleak vision of war to the end. Israelis say that they tried this at Camp David in 2000 and got nowhere. Well then, they—and the Americans—need to try again. When Palestinians come to believe that a generous two-state deal is really available, many may reconsider their support of Hamas. It is time to soften the economic pressure and negotiate a detailed promise of statehood that Mr Abbas can take to his people. It will be hard, but this is a better way to win the argument against Hamas than the past year's vain efforts to make the Palestinians jump through verbal hoops they have come to consider humiliating.